Tag: strength straining

  • Staying on Track with Fitness Goals During the Holidays

    Staying on Track with Fitness Goals During the Holidays

    With New Year’s Eve coming up we know that we will all be tempted to indulge in food and drinks to celebrate and bring in the New Year. This article will discuss what we can do to stay on track with our fitness goals while still being able to enjoy our time around friends and family.

    The bottom line is that we should not let our fitness goals get in the way of enjoying our lives. That being said, there are definitely some strategies we can take to keep us from drifting too far from our goals.

    The first, and easiest strategy we can take is to get some exercise on the day you know you will be celebrating. As long as the intensity is high enough, we will experience excess post oxygen consumption (EPOC) from exercise (strength training, biking, running, rowing, stair master) where we will increase our calories burned as our body continues to deliver oxygen to our working muscles throughout the rest of the day. If you know you will be eating or drinking more than usual, do a little extra exercise as this will help us stay on track and avoid us from gaining unnecessary weight. Exercise leading up to the celebration is a great way to get ahead of everything but what should we do during our celebrations?

    The issue we find with New Year’s Eve festivities is that those of us over the age of 21 have a tendency to drink alcohol. Drinking calories is counterintuitive to our fitness goals because we do not get as full from drinking our calories as compared to eating food.

    One contributing factor of satiety (how full we get) is time spent chewing and since we do not chew liquids, we do not get as full. Something we can do to combat this is obviously not to drink but for those of us who still might have a few drinks, we can choose drinks with clear alcohol (white rum, vodka, tequila, gin, etc.) as these have significantly lower calorie content than dark liquor (dark rum, whiskey, bourbon, etc.) or beer.

    If you are someone who mixes alcohol with soda, opting for a diet soda or tonic/seltzer water is a good alternative. When consuming alcohol, we should try to drink at least half of the fluid we drink in alcohol in water. So, if we drink 32 Oz. of alcohol throughout the night, we should at least drink 16 Oz. of water. Consuming electrolytes will also help our body retain the water we drink; so beginning the night with a low sugar sports drink or cup of water with an electrolyte packet would help us stay hydrated even more!

    Regardless, if you take part in drinking alcohol or not, we should all make a serious effort to eat well during this time. We discussed the rather obvious issue there is with drinking calories during the holidays but what isn’t as obvious is what we can do with our diet. The issue here comes from the macronutrient composition of the foods that are commonly served at holiday parties. Since this is a time of celebration, most of the food served at these events tend to either be high in fat, or high in sugar as we enjoy these the most.

    Foods with a combination of high fat and high sugar do not naturally occur in the world. Since our body’s physiology is built through evolutionary adaptations, as soon as we sense this non-naturally occurring food substance high in sugar (fast absorbing energy) and fat (high concentration of energy) we are immediately signaled (with dopamine) to eat as much as we possibly can as our bodies are unsure when we will be able to consume this much energy again. This is highly individual but can be the reason some of you may notice it is easier to abstain from eating certain foods rather than only have a little bit – once the flood gates open there’s no stopping.

    Staying away from these foods is a good idea but keeping our consumption of them low is also an acceptable strategy to take as long as you have good self-control. In addition to staying away from foods high in fat and sugar, we can try to fill ourselves up on protein (we need this to recover from our training and to meet our fitness goals) so that we are already too full to stuff ourselves by the time dessert comes around.

    As we said before, the most important part of all of this is to not let our fitness goals get in the way of us enjoying our time spent around friends and family. It is important for us to make an effort to be healthy but only if it does not take away from us enjoying the moments that matter most.

    If you have ever wondered what you could be doing differently during the holidays to continue to meet your goals, give us a call (312-666-7147) or send us an email (info@performancetrainingsystems.com) and one of our many qualified professionals eager to help will be in touch with you!

  • How to Lose Body Fat While Keeping Muscle Part 2

    How to Lose Body Fat While Keeping Muscle Part 2

    Part 2

    In part 1 of this article, we discussed what we need to do to lose body fat in a safe and effective way. Now we will dive into how you can utilize this information to begin implementing a diet that will help you reach your individual fat loss goals.

    Eating the right amount and type of fat throughout the day is essential for losing body fat and reaching optimal health. Fats play a huge role in disease prevention and our ability to lose body fat without causing any hormone dysregulation. In order to meet our daily fat intake without being unhealthy we should try to stay away from hydrogenated, safflower, canola, peanut, and cottonseed oils as overconsumption of these fats can be harmful to the body. Instead, we should be eating healthy fat sources like wild caught fish (Alaskan Salmon, sardines, mackerel), grass fed bison, beef, lamb, and eggs. We should start by consuming 0.4 grams of fat for every pound of body weight we have (180lb person should eat 72g of fat in a day).

    Once we know our fat and protein intake, we can then fill the rest of our calories in with carbohydrates. Using the information from the previous article titled: “How to Begin a Fat Loss Diet”, we can find our BMR. We will continue the example used in that article here (27-year-old, 180lb sedentary male – BMR = 2,176 calories per day). Since we know that carbohydrates and protein each have 4 calories per gram and fat has 9, if this person eats 72g of fat (648 calories) and 180g of protein (720 calories), they will then need to eat 808 calories worth of carbohydrates (648+720 = 1,368 then 2,176-1,368 = 808) to meet their maintenance BMR for the day. Since carbohydrates contain 4 calories per gram, this person would then eat 202g carbohydrates; again, this is to eat at maintenance, not in a “calorie deficit”.

    If we were to train hard and frequently, we will actually lose body fat and build muscle eating right at our BMR – a 0 calorie deficit will cause our bodies to to replace our glycogen stores with energy pulled from our fat stores, and our muscles would be able to use the food we eat to repair themselves. Taking this a step further, eating in a 250-calorie deficit will have the same physiological adaptation as 0 but will require more body fat energy to be used and we will thus, lose body fat at a faster rate. Less food, however, means our body begins to share the energy we eat between replenishing glycogen stores and repairing the force producing components of our muscles. This means we will not be able to gain strength as fast with fewer calories. The full extent to the “calorie deficit” would be 500 calories below BMR. A 500-calorie deficit is considered the “full extent” because it is past this point where most of the food, we eat needs to be used to replenish our glycogen stores, so we are left with less to repair our muscles. No matter how big of a calorie deficit we have, protein intake should stay the same, only manipulating carbohydrates and fat to change how big our deficit is.

    As we previously mentioned, if our example individual were eating at their BMR with a 0-calorie deficit, they should eat at least 180g of protein, 48g of fat, and 202g of carbohydrates. At a 250-calorie deficit, they would eat the same protein and fat, but lower the carbs by 62g to 140g at a total of 1,926 daily calories. At a 500-calorie deficit, I would still keep fat and protein the same but lower the carbs by 125g to 77g at a total of 1,676 daily calories. You can also manipulate fat intake as well (staying in our 0-500 calorie deficit) by using the multiplier from before, but we should go no lower than 0.3g/lb. body mass (54g fat for 180lb male). Eating below this should be avoided as hormone regulation can be negatively influenced beyond this point – this is especially true for females.

    Remember, while more aggressive diet strategies do yield faster results, you may be able to lose more weight throughout a year with less aggressive strategies. One of the main reasons for this is our hunger hormones (leptin and ghrelin) are primarily driven by the food we eat so, the more aggressive of a calorie deficit we have, the more aggressive our hunger cravings will be and thus, the harder it will be to eat something healthy rather than something fast and easy just to keep the cravings at bay.

    For more information on how to reach your individual fitness goals give us a call or email and one of our many qualified professionals can help you get started with a training or nutrition plan perfectly developed for your individual goals.

    References:

    • Wilkinson, 2016
    • Helms, 2022
    • Antonio, 2018
    • MacNaughton, 2016